....Despite having only 25,000 inhabitants in the mid-1880s, Altoona had a prominent history of local amateur baseball when, in early 1884, it found itself wooed by Henry V. Lucas, founder and principal backer of the Union Association, a prospective major league. Lucas was interested in the city mainly because, having failed to place a team in Pittsburgh, he needed a convenient stopover for other UA teams traveling east and west....

The Mountain Cities opened the 1884 season in Cincinnati where they were billed as the "Famous Altoonas." (Local partisans called the team the Pride or the Ottawas.) .... By even the mediocre standards of the UA, the Mountain Citys were demonstrably overmatched. They lost their first 11 games. The defense and pitching were abominable, making 53 errors and giving up 92 runs in eight games against Lucas' St. Louis Maroons. By late May, the Mountain Citys were a financial disaster. Attendance slipped as low as 200 and ... the average home attendance for 17 games was only slightly more than 1,000 ....

Eventually, the club fell into arrears in salary payments, and players either scrambled off to other teams or withheld their services until they received their money. On May 29, Lucas ... refused to subsidize the club's losses. The directors paid the players what they were owed and became the first of the UA clubs to disband. Having also forgotten the reason he had found Altoona so useful, Lucas moved the franchise to Kansas City 1,000 miles to the west.

Donald Dewey & Nicholas Acocella

Total Baseball

....In 1883, a group of sixteen local businessmen, headed by Arthur Dively and William Ritz, formed a semipro team that traveled the Commonwealth taking on other teams. The team included numerous players destined for major league time, most notably George "Germany" Smith. The team drew 1600 fans per game from a fan base of 25,000 people.

At the conclusion of the 1883 season, Dively and Ritz had joined the Inter-State Association, but in February 1884, half the teams jumped to the Eastern League. Altoona, sensing the ISA was a sinking ship, tried to follow, but were denied.

Then the amazing happened. They were invited to join the new Union Association....